The adoption and spread of agriculture enabled the rise of the state 5500 years ago (beginning the last 2% of human history). Metallurgy, superior military organization, and ideology empowered warrior elites to gain ownership and control of the means of production. All others were forced into subservient roles to access the productive resources necessary for survival. The work experience was debased, and ever since most workers have been exploited and unfree, their surplus expropriated as slaves, serfs, indentured servants, indebted peasants, and wage earners. Understandably, work came to be viewed negatively as an often highly unpleasant means of survival. In modern times, work experience came to be further debased by extreme division of labor, machine regularity, and “scientific management” that divorced workers from decision-making and lodged it in managers. Even economic science came to depict work negatively as disutility. Suffering these debased work conditions, when workers gained formal political power in the late nineteenth century, their living standards improved and their work came to be viewed as a mere means for income with which to consume. With their work debased and unobservable to those outside factories, they sought social respect, self-respect, and status thought consumption. They joined elites in the competitive conspicuous consumption that so irked Thorstein Veblen.